#an5002

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Final render for AN5002

Improved the tail animation and the lift of the front right leg at frame 114. However, I was unable to improve the textures of the rig. One solution was to enable the fur on the model, but when rendering, I couldn’t remove the black artifacts around the image planes that made up the fur when with the ray depth for transparency at a high value, so to save render time I disabled the fur. The seams were still mostly visable regardless if there was fur or not anyway.

I slightly improved the render quality render quality despite having to have the camera AA at the lowest setting. I think it was improved by increasing the samples for the skydome. I would have liked to increase the camera AA, but the setting I wanted for it would have taken 21 hours to render all 420 frames, and I only had 7 or so hours so had to sacrafice the quality to ensure I met the deadline.

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Render of my wolf animation for AN5002

There are still a number of things, highlighted from both feedback and self assessments, that I want to improve upon. However, given how close the deadline is, I am unsure if I am able to implement these changes and willing to submit this as final piece if I am unable to render a better result in time.

The main changes I want to make are;

- Fixing the ugly seems on the rig

- Make the tail flow more from frames 94 to 134

- Bring the right front leg up sooner around frame 114 to avoid the broken shape from over-streching

- Improve the overall render quality/ adjust settings to reduce the noise in the scene

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This is (hopefully) the final playblast before rendering. Since the last update, I have added grass to the environment, improved the animation for the face, ears & tail, and extended the animation to 17 seconds to include the wolf stretching down to sniff the meat.

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Current environement progress.

I was having issues with the textures, especially with the floor which is why the floor textures are so low-res. However, I don’t want to spend too much time on the environment when there’s still more animation I want to do with the wolf.

I would like to add grass to the scene (following Alex’s animated grass tutorial that was went through in class https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC-yXs3TBbA)

More foliage would add to a more realistic environment but would increase render time and currently this one frame took 5 minutes to render. With 420 frames, the whole animation would take over 30 hours to render, so I don’t want to go overboard with the foliage.

I am happy with the composition of the environment though. I’ve designed it so the wolf stops in front of the clearing (between the trees on the left and the tree on the right) and this area of less detail brings the focal point of the composition to the wolf.

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Weekend goal is to complete the environment for the wolf animation.

Meat model from; https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/meat-and-bone-ef44042dd69c48e1aaba668074ca100c

Tree and rock from: https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/plant/leaf/forest-pack-aaa9f1f2-688d-4e53-92e0-db89d1a81637

HDR from: https://polyhaven.com/

Additionally, I was having issues with getting the image planes for the leaves and fur of the wolf to have transparency. However, I found a tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82Vgd0E3p2w) for transparent image planes in Arnold which helped solve this issue.

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Got the body and leg movement to a point I’m happy with (for now). Next I plan to add animation to the ears and facial features and improve the tail animation.

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Blocked out the walk cycle, still a lot of cleanup to do. I’ve started the cleanup process by annotating all the sections where the body movement doesn’t match the reference (using syncsketch to annotate).

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Trimmed version of the references. I plan to animate the movement of the wolf that enters on the right (as opposed to the one that entered on the left) as it had a more exciting movement to it with the short trot at turning as opposed to the other that walks in a straight line to the rock. However, I still want to animate the sniff of the rock from the left-hand wolf as it can give way to a chance to add narrative of some sort to the animation. So I cut the clip so that the 2nd wolf is in a similar position to the 1st at the end of the first clip, so that my animation will feature the wolf trotting in from the right, coming to a stop after turning, then sniffing. However, if this ends up making my animation too long, I may settle with just animating the wolf turning and coming to a stop without the sniff. This may make it have less of a sense of narrative but I’d rather have that then the animation not be producable in the 2-week deadline that has been given.

Clips from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3aGMD3iVbQ